Thursday, September 3, 2009

My Husband and I Talk About Music

Husband: What is this? It sounds like a cat being disemboweled and strangled with its own intestines!(Query: How does he know this? Surely even the most sordid moments of a doctor's training... )Me: Actually, it is Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time - what, you don't like it?Husband (somewhat bug-eyed): No, I don't like it; I don't like it at all.Me: Really? But it's such a work of genius! And he composed it when he was a POW during WWII - he was in the French Resistance, you know - and they said he had to do a concert for Christmas, and he composed this specifically for the four instruments that they gave them in the camp!Husband: Well, that explains it - clearly an act of passive aggression against the Nazis. But what did I do that you make me suffer so?Me *heaves long-suffering sigh* : Alright. *Puts on Velvet Underground*Husband (plaintively): What's wrong with Eric Clapton, or Elton John, for heaven's sake? Don't you like Sting? Why don't you like Sting?Me: Listen, this could be the Misfits now. Do you want it to be the Misfits?

At this point, the omelet in the pan and the scones in the oven are simultaneously Done, necessitating a burst of graceless scrambling and juggling on my part. When dinner is plated and Calm restored, my ipod has shuffled over to Mozart's Requiem; as this is something we can both enjoy, I leave it on to as background music for family dinner. Infant hums along to the Dies Irae, which pleases us both and is telephonically reported to Husband's father, who proclaims Infant "a second Rachmaninov" - an improvement on the usual "A second Lenin!" that greets any and all discovery of Infant's genius super-powers.